Hong Kong to move to Asia and cricket to seek recognition as an Olympic sport - that's the main news coming out of last week's meeting of the ICC's Development Committee.

The Committee has backed a request from the Hong Kong Cricket Association to be 'transferred' to the ICC's Asian development region.

The transfer is expected to be ratified when voted on at the meeting of the ICC's Executive Committee in Melbourne in February as both the ICC and the HKCA are in favour of the move.

HKCA operations manager, Mark Burns, described the recommendation as a logical one.

"We've been lobbying the ICC to be included in Asia after we were placed in the East Asia-Pacific region," Mr. Burns said.

"We feel we are part of the Asian region as we have been playing Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Bangladesh for ages."

Mr. Burns anticipated the shift would benefit Hong Kong cricket immensely.

"In terms of progress, the Asian Cricket Council is pretty good in wanting to promote cricket throughout the region," Mr Burns said. "Pakistan is doing a great job in its leadership role of the Asian Cricket Council at the moment."

He added greater opportunities for the Hong Kong national team to get exposure against the highest standard of opposition.

"One of the main benefits is the potential to play in regional tournaments such as the Asia Cup. For countries at our level it makes for us to get the hardest matches possible." Hong Kong qualified for next April's Asia Cup in Pakistan, along with the United Arab Emirates, by making the final of the recent Asian Cricket Council Trophy in Sharjah and Dubai.

Mr. Burns' observations unwittingly summarise some of the inherent problems of the East Asia-Pacific zone.

Unlike Asia's Test countries, Australia and New Zealand have demonstrated little interest in assisting in the game's development in the East Asia-Pacific region, providing only token help.

It is also one of two development zones, Americas is the other, without a regional association.

A further dilemma will arise when the ICC needs to allocate each development zone qualifying places for future editions of the ICC Trophy. Next year's event will be the last where all Associate countries automatically participate.

With only two Associate members, other development zones are likely to fight East Asia-Pacific receiving more than qualifying spot. One official at the ACC Trophy told BTTW he felt it was unfair for EA-P to be allocated even one.

"That would mean 50% of countries qualify - wherelse will that happen."

(One solution may be to have the Papua-New Guinea and/or Fiji play in the Asian qualifiers).

It may be comforting for the ICC to know that FIFA, sport's most professional global governing body has had similar problems with its Oceania confederation. Every four years it has been baffled with finding a World Cup qualifying path for the Oceania winner.

In soccer/football circles there has been talk for years that Oceania be absorbed into the Asian Confederation.

While that has not been proposed in cricket, the Asian Cricket Council is known to be keen to annex the East Asian region into its development zone.

ACC officials invited Japanese officials at the ACC Trophy to move to the ACC's jurisdiction, but they declined.

It was always going to be and always has been a dilemma for the ICC as to what to do with the Pacific region.

Critics of the ICC should not smile as not too many outside the ICC have solutions to the problem.

Meanwhile, the ICC will seek International Olympic Committee recognition as the governing body for cricket - however, it will not seek to have cricket placed on the IOC roster.

IOC recognition will allow many ICC members to access crucial government funding. It is not dependant on cricket actually being played at the Olympics.

It is understood members of the Development Committee felt it was close to an impossibility that the IOC would include cricket on its roster anyway, mainly due to the logistical problems presented by building suitable venues.

For any application to be successful the ICC and the International Women's Cricket Council will need to merge to form a unified governing body, one of the main preconditions of the IOC.

You can read more on the 'Cricket at the Olympics' issue in the September 2 and September 21 editions of 'Beyond The Test World.'

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